Noel's Scrabble Tips

Tips for More Advanced Players
- Learning Words

By this stage you may be beginning to be overawed by the
amount of word learning that you will apparently have to
put in, to make the grade in Scrabble, so it is a good
time to put this into some sort of proper perspective.

It is really up to you how far you wish to take this.
If it gets to the point that it seems to be rather too
much like hard work, and the game is losing its sense of
fun, then you have obviously gone too far. If, on the
other hand, you feel you are getting some satisfaction
from improving your game by adding more and more to the
weapons in your armoury, then, perhaps, it is worth
continuing with it. There is a law of diminishing returns.
The difference between a player who knows all of the
words that could be at his/her disposal (and there are
one or two players who claim to know them with, at least,
some degree of certainty), and the player who knows half
of the first player’s vocabulary may be quite marginal,
provided only that the second player has concentrated
his/her efforts on the optimum half. After all, at one
extreme, what is the sense in knowing a word like ZIZZ?
If it ever came up on your rack, it would portend an
extravagant waste of blanks! On the other hand, not
knowing QI would put you at an obvious disadvantage.
The trick is to sort out the words which will deliver
the speediest returns when it comes to improving your
game. You want the maximum gain, for the least effort.

In the UK Scrabble scene we use the Official Scrabble Words
International(OSWI) as our Bible. This book is published
by Chambers, and is a resume, prepared by a number of
the country’s top players, of all the allowable words
in The Chambers Dictionary. By convention it is used as
the final adjudication in all games of Club Scrabble.
If a word is to be found in the OSWI then it is taken to
be allowed, even if the OSWI is in error. If the word is
longer than 9 letters, then it may not be in the OSWI,
and the adjudicator might need to resort to the dictionary
itself.

There are over 140,000 words in the OSWI. This compares
with a respectable non-specialist vocabulary, in written
English, of perhaps 30,000 words maximum. To embark on
learning the rest would obviously be a huge task for
anyone who does not have a photographic memory. When
you first sit down opposite a Club player, you will be
at an obvious disadvantage, if you are only armed with
a normal vocabulary. At first sight the board will
appear to be gobbledegook, and you will not believe that
the game is being played in English. The fact is,
though, that, with around a million words in the
definitive Oxford English Dictionary, most of the
English language is foreign to all of us. One man’s
gobbledegook is another’s specialist vocabulary. We do
not make up the words. We merely play with them. Once
you give yourself the chance to get over the initial
shock, you will soon learn that many of the words that
you see, come up all the time, and learning them is not
nearly so difficult as it first seems.

Take, for example, the 124 two-letter words. These
form the basic cement which holds the game together.
Most of the better-scoring moves involve running words
alongside each other. In the process, lots of two-
letter words are formed at the same time as larger words
are laid. Nearly every player in any club will be
comfortable with their two-letter word list, most of
which will look very strange to a new player:

But are these words really so strange? Take out the
everyday words (27):

Extract the English letter names (8). Yes, they’re
allowed!

And all the interjections - the words you might never
write, but frequently see in comic-strips! (24)

The musical notes, in the tonic-sol-fa scale -
"doh-re-mi-fa-soh-la-te-doh", allowing for alternative
spellings (6, in the two-letter list):

The Greek letters so beloved of scientists (that's 4
2-letter ones):

Now remove all the slang, or old words which you probably
find quite familiar, but perhaps did not expect to be
able to play (12).

That leaves us with 43 genuinely strange words, to learn.
Not nearly such a huge task.

If you are of Scottish extraction, you will be able to
cross off even more of these words! With a little
imagination we might have ascribed our own meanings to
one or two of these. If such things help you to remember
the words then it hardly seems to matter whether or not
you are remembering them for the right reasons!

Your first task in word-learning, then, is to learn some
43 unusual two-letter words. These are all-powerful,
and their usefulness is not in any doubt. The two-letter
words are the glue which holds everything together.

One point worth noting for later, is that there are no
two-letter words which end in C, K, J, Q, V and Z.
Perhaps you are not surprised by that, or perhaps
nothing will surprise you anymore! The point, though,
is that this fact can be exploited in defensive play,
to prevent your opponent from playing words alongside
these letters, and hence to "block" the board.

The next point of attack is the three-letter word list.
This, also, is a powerful tool to have completely at
your command, but, you will be relieved to hear that
this is already a list which fewer players know well.

You can use the same tricks to cut down on the task of
learning this roughly 1000-word list. Firstly,
cross-out all the everyday words. Then cross-out any
more that you can eliminate under general headings such
as musical notes, interjections etc., which may allow
you to remember them without being quite so rigorous.
This should leave you with about 600 strange words.
Now start to apply some techniques which become more and
more useful as your word-learning continues. Prioritize
the remaining words so that you begin by learning the
most useful ones. For example, you will certainly find
it useful to know the three-letter words which include
one or more of the high-scoring letters, J, Q, X, and Z.
This will amount to some 60 or 70 words, many of which
you may have already crossed-off as "everyday words".

Because of the fact that there are no two-letter words
involving the V, which is a nasty letter which you might
well want to get rid of, at some stage, it is not a bad
idea to learn all the three-letter words which contain
a V. The K, being worth 5 points, is another letter that
you might want to feel fully-armed to use. You might
set a high priority on learning all the three-letter
words which involve the K.

Hooks are now a major consideration. What
three-letter words can be made by placing a letter either
in front of, or after, a two-letter word? Just as it is
important to know the two-letter words, so that you can
place words alongside other words, already on the board,
knowing the hooks which go on the two-letter words, will
allow you to do the same with even more effectiveness.
Just watch the way in which staircases seem to build-up
on the board when both players know their hooks. It can
be a nightmare if you are trying to get a bonus-word
onto such a board, but it can also be a very profitable
technique when you are simply trying to make the best of
difficult letters. Of course, the best three-letter
words to learn, are going to be the ones which can
result from hooks both before, and after, two-letter
words. For example, KAW could be made be putting a K in
front of AW, or a W after KA. If you do not want to
spend the time learning all the three-letter words, these
would be just the sorts of words to pick-out with a
highlight pen, and stick on the inside of the toilet-door!

The four-letter words, some 6000 of them, are another
ominous-looking set. You may be provided with
lists of two- and three-letter words when you join a
club. How do you pick out the four-letter words? The
"Official Scrabble Lists" (OSL), now in its International
edition, and also published by Collins, has been
compiled by Allan Simmons and Darryl Francis, who also
played major roles in the compilation of Collins Scrabble
Tournament and Club Word List CSTCWL). This invaluable
aid to word-learning, provides useful lists of words
from the CSTCWL. In particular it provides a
complete list of the four-letter words. Small help,
though, unless you really have difficulty sleeping at
nights! However, it also provides lists, by word-length,
of all the words that contain the higher-scoring tiles.
It is well worth your while learning, for a start, the
four-letter words that include the J, Q, X, and Z.

Other useful four-letter words might include all those
that contain 3 (or more! - learn "EUOI" - it is
invaluable!) vowels. These words will help you to
resolve serious rack imbalances without your having to
lose score while changing. Similarly, there are a few
four-letter words which contain 2 Is or 2 Us. Being
able to get rid of 2 Is without sacrificing a score is
always a welcome option.

After that, you are in the same game that you were in
before, with the three-letter word list. The hooks -
four-letter words that result from adding a letter
before or after an existing three-letter word, are the
next most important words to learn. This is still a
huge task. A little thought, though, tells us that
these words are going to be less useful for building
staircases, and rather more useful for getting bonus
words onto difficult boards. Obviously, bonus-words
will contain, vowels, especially Es, and usually the
1-point consonants, especially the S. Concentrate on
learning the hooks which involve these additional letters,
both before, and after the three-letter words.

You can extend this policy to the five-letter words if
you so wish, but a measure of the task is indicated by
the fact that the CSTCWL does not even include a complete
five-letter word list. It does, however, include lists
of those words which contain the J, Q, X, and Z, words
which contain 4 vowels, and words which contain 2 Is,
2 Us, 3 As etc. It also covers all the hooks.

It is a better policy to move on to the bonus word sets.
I have explained, in the rack-management section, why it is helpful
to learn a large number of mutually-supporting six-letter
bonus sets, so that you can build them up, with confidence,
from four-letter sets. I provide a comprehensive
list of the six-letter bonus sets which can be built up
from the 10 four-letter sets listed earlier.
I also provide a summary of all these bonus sets, and
list, in brackets, for reference, the number of the list
as it appears in the OSL.
The OSL lists 250 six-letter bonus sets, and gives them
a rather different ranking in terms of usefulness. This
ranking is based on 1) the probability that the six tiles
will turn-up at random, on your rack, and 2) the
probability that the group will then make seven-letter
words with the remaining letters in the bag. The value
of the first of these factors is greater for the novice
than it is for the seasoned player. Once you learn to
start saving specific sets of tiles, the probabilities
will change in favour of those six-letter groups which
are favoured by the four- and five-letter sets that you
choose to save. But for a first shot at the problem,
you are probably better-off following the OSL, which,
for example, lists AEINRT, or RETAIN, as the most
productive six-letter group. The seven-letter anagrams
in each set, will not all be unfamiliar, so that, once
you have been through such a set, you may only be presented
with between 10 and 20 new words to learn. Even these
can be prioritised, so that, for example, you might
choose to learn, first, all the strange seven-letter
words which are formed when the six-letter group is
matched with one of the commonly occurring vowels,
A, E, I and O. Learning OTARINE, for example, allows
you to cover the possibility of holding such a set as
RETAIN, and picking up one of 8 possible Os which may
not yet have appeared. This will clearly be 4 times as
useful as learning that RETAIN with a B makes ATEBRIN.
Running through the 10 or 20 highest-ranked six-letter
sets should not be too great a task, and should provide
you with a good grounding on which to build.

A further, intermediate step to next, extending this
grounding could be to concentrate on the mutually-supporting
six-letter sets that would arise out of the word
"RELATIONS" when any 3 of the letters are removed,
especially those groups which include, at least, an E
and an S. These groups would serve you well whenever
you start with any of the 10 four-letter sets listed in
the Rack-Management section.